Another set of new APIs in the upcoming GLib 2.63.1 release allow you to steal all the contents of a GArray, GPtrArray or GByteArray, and continue using the array container to add more contents to in future.

This is work by Paolo Bonzini and Emmanuel Fleury, and will be available in the soon-to-be-released 2.63.1 release.

Here’s a quick example using GPtrArray — usage is similar in GArray and GByteArray:

g_autoptr(GPtrArray) chunk_buffer = g_ptr_array_new_with_free_func (g_bytes_unref);

/* Some part of your application appends a number of chunks to the pointer array. */
g_ptr_array_add (chunk_buffer, g_bytes_new_static ("hello", 5));
g_ptr_array_add (chunk_buffer, g_bytes_new_static ("world", 5));

…

/* Periodically, the chunks need to be sent as an array-and-length to some other part of the program. */
GBytes **chunks;
gsize n_chunks;

chunks = g_ptr_array_steal (chunk_buffer, &n_chunks);
for (gsize i = 0; i < n_chunks; i++)
  {
    /* Do something with each chunk here, and then free them, since g_ptr_array_steal() transfers ownership of all the elements and the array to the caller. */
    …

    g_bytes_unref (chunks[i]);
  }

g_free (chunks);

/* After calling g_ptr_array_steal(), the pointer array can be reused for the next set of chunks. */
g_assert (chunk_buffer->len == 0);